


Dissonance

by Yeah_JSmith



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Anger, Culpability, Dialogue Only Implied, Gen, Loss, Mid-Canon, The Feeling of Not Being Enough, Unresolved Emotional Tension, We Already Know What's Being Said
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-25
Updated: 2021-02-25
Packaged: 2021-03-16 02:35:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 426
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29693724
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yeah_JSmith/pseuds/Yeah_JSmith
Summary: These traditions should be hers. She should understand more than the bare bones of the sentiment. She should understand what it means to catch a name in her hand. But she doesn't, and maybe she doesn't deserve to.(Furiosa is Other, and her own People remind her of this.)
Relationships: Furiosa & The Vuvalini (Mad Max), Furiosa & The Wives
Kudos: 5





	Dissonance

**Author's Note:**

> That scene where the Vuvalini all reach out to honor Mary Jo Bassa and Furiosa doesn't know what they're on about? I'm sorry why not just punch me in the face?
> 
> *I might pick over their bones, but don't consider the comics canon. Aside from _Furiosa_ being garbage, I don't like including "supplemental material" that costs upwards of $100. At least the movies are free to borrow from the library.

There are many days Furiosa doesn’t remember. She came to the Citadel with her own name, old enough to hold onto it but not old enough to remember much about the Green Place. If she cared to try, she might number her missing days among the thousands — but it might have only been a few hundred, or thirty. She wrapped herself in green and soothed herself with the memories of her memories of her People, whittled them down to their smallest, sharpest pieces and pierced them deep in her brain. Swaddle Dog. Initiate-mother. Vuvalini. These things mean something, said in an order. If her mother had lived, Furiosa might know what. She never expected it to matter again. 

When she tells these women, the emissaries of the Many Mothers, about Mary Jo Bassa’s death, they reach out and grab the air, bringing little specs of nothing to their chests. Haltingly, Furiosa copies the gesture. She’s not particularly affected by the death anymore — it’s been so long now she can’t remember her mother’s face, or her voice, or even whether the woman she thinks she almost-halfway-remembers was her mother at all or some other woman captured in the same raid — but this is something tangible, something alive, something _real_ that should be _hers._

This is something she would know, had she not been ripped from her People. 

Some part of her knows she has no right to be this maudlin about it. She is no different to standard Citadel stock, after all. She wears their grease and drives their rig and has shed more tears over her crew than she has to spare for any runaway wife, Splendid or not. What right has Imperator Furiosa (with all the baggage and blood that title entails) to claim a place among a People she always imagined were antithetical to the culture whose traditions she upheld — whose traditions she _enforced?_

(Her People are nearly _gone;_ the world goes white and soundless as her body disconnects. The bright, shining young women she abducted almost had her convinced that keeping her word might _actually_ redeem her. There is no redemption to be found, and there never was.)

Furiosa may have betrayed the only home she remembers with any kind of permanence, but she is not Vuvalini just because she used to be. Her People were stolen from her, and her chance to relearn herself at the Green Place was leeched from the soil while she was planting antiseed with her genuinely beloved crew, and there’s nothing left for her in either direction—

**Author's Note:**

> If anyone even bothered to read this and you followed from my other stuff: don't take this as a signal for a return to my WIP. This is just something to work out my angst about some things. If anything, I'll probably write about chronic illness next ~~or just do some more tentacle porn if I can find an appropriate fandom for it~~.


End file.
